What Radio Shack taught me: Lessons from a rookie salesman

Over the past week, as it became clear that struggling electronics retailer Radio Shack would need to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, tech workers and entrepreneurs have come forward to explain how much the store meant to them. After all, Radio Shack offered a seemingly endless supply of electronic doo-dads, making it a veritable oasis to any curious tech mind.

I owe Radio Shack a different kind of debt of gratitude. The retailer gave me my very first real paying job, in 2000. At 17, a year shy of what they preferred, Radio Shack hired me—for $5.15 an hour plus commission, if I sold enough—as a sales associate at their Northport store, a sleepy enclave on the north shore of Long Island. On Thursday, the 94-year-old corporation filed for bankruptcy and announced that it will likely be closing a sizable portion of its 4,000 stores. Here are a few things the company taught me during my first entree into the working world.

Knowing that you know nothing

My first days on the job made for an exercise in infuriating ignorance. Sure, I could program my parents’ VCR and get them connected to the Internet, but I didn’t know my way from nickel cadmium to lithium ion. I knew so very little about the many, many different cords and adapters and other electronic parts that were packed into this small storefront space.

At first, I tried to bluff my way out of my predicament, giving customers what I thought they needed. That was a disaster. After a few botched sales and subsequent returns, I decided I needed to try a different tack: embrace my ignorance and start asking questions to just about anyone, even customers. I figured they’d be better off with a novice salesman who knew he was a novice and was willing to admit it. After a while, I started to become more comfortable with the twinge of pain that would always come when I knew I didn’t know the answer. And by that time, I gradually began to know some of the answers.

Standing up for what’s yours

At 17, I was the youngest salesman at the Northport Radio Shack. And I was shy by nature. Put simply, I was not going to be the one charming customers just as they walked through the front door and sending them home with plenty more than they had come in looking for. Some of my coworkers had a habit of simply stalking the entrance of the store, just waiting to swoop in on arrivals. I’d spend most of my time toward the back, unpacking boxes, fixing up the store, or minding the counter.

Thankfully, I had an ally, in an 80-some-odd-year-old gentleman coworker named Ed. I heard his son was some Radio Shack executive, and I got the feeling that he was deposited at our store because some unseen relative simply wanted him out of the house for a little while. It was probably his last job.

Ed saw my colleagues slyly push their way into more sales, and he gave me a good shove. “Get out there in front. Don’t stand back here with an old man like me,” he told me. It was my first on-the-job assertiveness training. Unlike the classroom, rules of equity are rarely, if ever, enforced at work. I had to step up if I wanted to be treated better. I moseyed my way up to the front of the store for a while, maybe worked with a customer or two, slunk back, Ed would give me another push, and the cycle would repeat.

The pricelessness of silence

As a rookie salesman just starting to know my way around the cordless phones and coaxial cables, I was awash with new information. And I just assumed that customers would want to know what I knew too. So when I would pitch a curious browser, I would give them all the details I had in my arsenal. By the time I was finished describing all the features of an answering machine or the difference between a 900 Mhz and 2.4 Ghz phone, all I would get in return was a polite, bewildered smile and no sale.

After a few stumbles—okay, maybe more than a few—I realized the enormous value of silence. Most customers, I slowly learned, simply want to know that they are in good hands, that they can trust your judgment, and that whatever they came in to purchase won’t break as soon as they plug it in at home.

So I started to use my words sparingly, introduced just a small set of options to customers, and waited, patiently, for them to think their way through what they wanted. Quite often, customers reasoned that they needed or even deserved the higher priced product. They sold themselves. Now, if only Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You”—a holiday favorite my store kept on endless loop during the season—could have been silenced as well.

The uncertainty of our paths

My course had been set, I thought. I had just one year left of high school and I would then be a college student, probably in New York City. I was a decent student and I felt certain that I would have several different professional options in the coming years. I took it all for granted. My time at Radio Shack threw the silliness of my certainties into stark relief.

My boss, the store manager and an emigrant from Iran, said that he had trained to be an engineer in his home country. He would often talk about the affluent life he led in Iran, and how he possessed one of the very first car phones in the country. I don’t think he imagined he would be working in retail on Long Island. The manager’s deputy, a skilled, patient teacher who was brilliant with customers, was born with nerve damage that left one side of his body with limited functioning. He walked with a perpetual limp, which affected his confidence. He would wonder if he’d ever get his own store to manage.

The subsequent disappointment when things don’t go the way you planned can take a heavy toll. I had one middle-aged coworker who had just lost an engineering job and had come to Radio Shack as a last ditch effort, just to bring in some money to pay the bills. He struggled to learn the ropes. He would often show up to work looking disheveled and lost. I wonder how he felt asking a 17-year-old like me for help with the cash register in front of a customer. He did it anyway, though. And I’ll never forget the smile on his face when he landed another engineering gig and gave his notice.

My coworkers—smart, talented, ambitious grown-ups—had been thrown off what they thought was their rightful course. I got my first glance of career setbacks and the different ways in which people respond to the pain, from anger, impatience, resignation, and resolve.

Radio Shack gave me the gift of knowing what it means to have a job, from the taste of success of a first big sale, to the satisfaction of knowing more at the end of the day than when you started it, to realizing that there is no such thing as a preordained career.

Techies remember Radio Shack

Radio Shack RSH is on its last legs, reportedly in talks to shut down and sell its storefronts to companies like Sprint S and Amazon AMZN.

For many technologists, this is much more than just the loss of another strip mall retailer — it’s the end of where their passion really began. The place where they bought their first transistor, the place where they first learned to code. Fortune’s Term Sheet newsletter asked readers to submit their first memories or early experiences at Radio Shack, and got lots of nostalgic replies.

Below are some of our favorites:

• “Radio Shack was always my favorite store as a child. From their Battery of the Month Club, to their vacuum tube testers (remember those?) to their electronics kits and soldering irons, I was hooked as a young boy. No wonder I was always getting chased out of there! But the turning point for me was the TRS-80 (as I am sure it was pivotal for so many others) – that cemented my life as an engineer and geek. The TRS-80 was the first computer I typed into, wrote my first programs and played games on. Now, we never owned one – I did that all in the store. We were never in a position to spend the $1,000 (give or take) for the computer – but every trip to our little mall included a stop for me at Radio Shack.” — Jack Unverfurth, director of software at Get Real Health.

• “I learned BASIC programming at a RadioShack store when I was 11 years-old. They held this class in a back room at the store and me and a about a dozen adults learned how to do ‘Print’ and ‘If-Then’ statements. This was like 1981 and the first exposure any of us had to computer programming.” — James Navin, VP of strategic operations at Sharethrough

• “Mygrandfather — who is now 94 and who’s got all the zipper machine patents in Google patent search — took me to Radio Shack when I was about 8 years-old. He bought me a soldering iron and we made electromagnets. That was the first time i made something. I cant imagine what we would’ve made with Arduino or Raspberry PI. I guess the combination of entrepreneurial genes and that early time screwing around in grandpas lab inspired me to found MINR. — Sol Weinreich

• “My first computer was a TRS-80 bought in 1979 at local RadioShack – 16K with a black and white monitor and cassette tape drive. Wouldn’t have my 20 year career in tech if not for the experience of having a PC in our living room as an 8 year-old.” — Steven Mitzenmacher, VP of corporate development at NetApp

• “I used my Bar Mitzvah money to buy my first ‘personal’ computer in 1981 — the TRS-80 from RadioShack. It had no disk drives; the only memory was 16K of RAM. I had to save programs on a cassette tape, and the filenames could be no longer than two letters. So awesome.” Paul Greenberg, CEO of Nylon

• “Back in the mid-90s, there was no DigiKey or hundreds of other component sites. The information wasn’t as abundant either for amateur geeks (like myself), so you could bring a circuit board with burnt out component and get help finding replacement. RadioShack employees were true hardcore geeks. Somewhere in early 2000’s RadioShack started hiring sales people and not geeks, which resulted in Best Buy-esque experience. You may have wanted some random component, but were pushed cellphone plans instead. Knowledge of associates dropped to such low levels, they would read you what is on the box, but would have no idea what is the difference between resistor and capacitor. That is when the company became dead to me. — Apollo Sinkevicius, COO of Robin Powered

•“Radio Shack was one of my favorite stores growing up. My dad was an electrical engineer, so many a project involved a trip to Radio Shack: removing alternator noise from a car audio system, fixing the tube amp on my 1930s Hammond Organ, building a home-brew security system, etc. As the years went on, the front of the store was filled with more mobile phones & games, and our little section of resistors, capacitors & breadboards was relegated to a smaller and smaller back corner of the store.” — Matt Brezina, CEO of Sincerely Inc.

•“I grew up in Dallas, Texas. Radio Shack was everywhere. I could ride my bike to the nearest one in a shopping center that also had my haircut place (back when we called them ‘barbers’) and a local ice cream store that I loved but can’t remember the name of. Across the street was a Piggly Wiggly in a big shopping center. It’s all at Arapaho Road and Coit Road in Dallas in Spanish Village. I’d ride by bike up to Radio Shack and just sit and screw around in the store forever. I was always amazed at the diodes, capacitors, resistors, wires, and cables. Eventually they had a CB Radio that I somehow convinced my dad to by for his car. I was totally into Breaker-breaker-1-9 and my favorite thing to do was to say Breaker-breaker-1-9 I need to take a 10-100. When the TRS-80 came out, that was the end of that. I got an Apple II instead and when the Epson MX-80 printer came out, I was done with Radio Shack for a long time.” — Brad Feld, venture capitalist

• “During my early teenage years in the 90’s, my dad was posted in Sana’a, Yemen. For a kid in the MTV generation this spelt a death knell. Socially speaking, the city was as barren as its desert. But… it had a Radio Shack! For kids like me that was the epitome of cool. The Technic earphones and Sony tape decks were sights that we saw only on TV. But the Shack brought it to life for us. Many a dull afternoon have I spent foraging through their shelves. Hence nostalgia abounds whenever I think of them. Doubt if others see it my way, but Radio Shack would always be my yardstick as far as cool quotient comparisons go.” — Raju Joseph

• “I was an early personal computer hobbyist, and in 1981 entered Johns Hopkins University’s first national search for applications to benefit the disabled. My entry was a design and prototype for a word processing service that would hire typists who were blind to type dictation over the telephone and return finished text by e-mail. I used a TRS-80 and Radio Shack answering machine to prove the concept. The Radio Shack store in McLean, Virginia was where I got the equipment, but also found helpful people with ideas and encouragement. Word processing centers and services were, of course, quickly eclipsed by advances in business technology, but I still got that certificate on my wall.” — Alan Kotok, editor and publisher at Science & Enterprise

• “I was an early RS consumer having spent paperboy delivery money on countless ‘free’ baseball bat sized d-cell flashlights, the mystical p-boxes and subsequently, Band-Aids (early life lesson on how hot a solder iron can get…) to returning later as a college co-op student to the Fort Worth, TX headquarters. Tandy’s Research & Development division offered me a full-time offer upon graduation where I became part of the Team behind the TRS-80 and the new Tandy 2000 Personal Computers. Had the opportunity to meet Dell and Gates who were each just starting their respective companies.” — Don Metzger

• “Our dads built Heath kit stereos and passed on soldering skills and the maker spirit in projects we built from parts purchased at Radio Shack. I remember wanting my own radio, and us building a crystal radio to fit inside a 7-up can. One-part James Bond, one part learning the skills of engineers. The radio was my first project built with my dad, doing something he did as a boy. We later built a launcher for Estes rockets with buttons, switches, wire and solder from Radio Shack to start our family space program! Turning screen-time into ‘us time.'” – Joe Salesky, CEO of Ustyme

• “I learned how to program Basic on a Radio Shack (Tandy) TRS-80 in NYC in the early 80s. I would sit in the store for hours, program, and play. The software was downloaded from an audio cassette at a 300 Baud rate. A simple pong-like game would take about 5 mins to download from the cassette. Fun times.” Bart Schachter

• “I bought a 101-in-One electronics kit in the 70’s to have some fun tinkering. In the 80’s my little daughter took a liking to it and how things work. Her educational path lead her to a PhD in chemistry. I don’t doubt that the kit I bought from Radio Shack created her first science building block. Thank you Radio Shack!” — Len Charmichael, CFO of Sunnyside Corp.

• “When I was 12-14 years old (1979) I got into talking on CB radios. I think it had to do with Smokey and the Bandit. I went to Radio Shack weekly to get the latest antennae, amplifier, speaker, etc. I remember extending wires to all four corners of my room. The theory was the larger the antennae the more distant signals we could pick up.” — Keith Wasserstrom, consultant

• “When I was in high school, I was in a band. I thought we were the best band in school, but another band (whose lead singer was the son of the guy who owned the Detroit Pistons) always won competitions and I thought it was because they had better equipment. We couldn’t afford better equipment, so my dad and I started to go to Radio Shack and bought raw parts to put together a complete P.A. system. We never lost again. And I’ll always treasure spending time with dad and learning about the science behind the music. ” — Jason Mendelson, venture capitalist

• “For me, Radio Shack was the equivalent of today’s Apple store. I loved going in there and just looking around, wondering what half the stuff was, particularly their walls of transistors, capacitors, plugs and patch cords. One of my first at home/Saturday morning projects as a 10 year-old boy was to build a robot with tin cans my Mom had thrown out and plenty of lead solder and an ‘Archer’ soldering gun, which still works after 50 years, even the little light on the front! Unfortunately the robot never did. I also still have an Archer voltmeter from the early 70’s that works great. In my teens I used some of those transistors they sold to build a device that allowed me and a friend to make long-distance phone calls for free, even though we didn’t really have anyone to call. My dream as a kid was to someday work in a Radio Shack and, dare I think it, even manage one! Today I run a software development company and credit much of my tech curiosity to those days wandering – and wondering – around in my local Radio Shack. I’m sorry to see them go.” Frank Kenna, CEO of The Marlin Company

• “I still remember my brother and I as kids on a road trip fighting over a Walkman until my parents had to find a radio shack (without googlemaps) to buy a headphone splitter. Then we just argued over which cassette tapes to play.” Chris Livingston, associate with Summit Partners

• “I was a geek when being a geek was not fashionable. When portable computers weighed 40lbs and the concept of a laptop was just a dream.
I was a geek when a mouse was a furry thing that you chased out of your house not made a home on your desk.
I was a geek when computers had names like Trash 80
I was a geek on the cutting edge of technology,
I was a geek thanks to Radio Shack.”
– Warren Markowitz, Geek, attorney, radio host, and a kid from the 1980’s

RadioShack’s sales batteries are low

The troubled electronics retailer reported another big sales decline, posting a 14% drop in comparable sales for the three months ended May 3 and a much wider loss. Its lenders won’t let it close 900 underperforming stores it says it needs to so it can turn itself around, and mobile carriers are holding big promotions in their own stores, instead of at RadioShack, to get customers to switch.

All these problems point to another potential cash crunch in the short term if RadioShack’s RSH turnaround plan, focused on new in-store services and an overhaul of 40% of its product offerings, doesn’t take hold quickly enough.

“Our ability to maintain sufficient liquidity for the next 12 months to fund our operations and execute our strategic turnaround plan is contingent on improving the current trend in our operating results,” the company said in a regulatory filing Tuesday morning. So unless its sales, which have been in free fall since 2010, pick up, RadioShack said it will have to hold its hat out again, which will be hard given its debt load, downgrades this winter by the ratings agencies and a retail landscape that is hostile to consumer electronics retailers.

Radio Shack, which secured new loans just before the 2013 holiday shopping season, said that during the quarter, it had had to tap its credit facility for “general corporate purposes,” i.e. its day-to-day operations. Its cash was down to $61.8 million on May 3, from $109.6 million a year earlier.

“This is a solid statement that this is a troubled company from an operational and liquidity standpoint,” said David Tawil, co-founder of hedge fund Maglan Capital and a former bankruptcy attorney. “It’s going to be a tough road.” Shares were down 9% to $1.40, giving the retailer a market value of $140 million.

Radio Shack CEO Joe Magnacca, a turnaround expert who made his name by revamping the Duane Reade drugstore chain before Walgreen WAG bought it in 2010, put on a brave face on a call with Wall Street analysts.

He noted that RadioShack’s increased selection of Apple AAPL accessories had made it a Top 5 Apple retailer. The company has shrunk its supplier base, giving it more clout with those vendors and allowing it cut costs on some core products by as much as 8%. And he’s seeing better sales at the RadioShack stores that have been remodeled. On his watch, RadioShack has updated its logo, reduced store clutter and carrying more private-label goods, which offer higher margins.

Putting the merits of that his strategy aside, Magnacca has to deal with the reality of a shrinking consumer electronics market– Best Buy BBY, hhgregg HGG and even Costco Wholesale COST have all reported declining electronics sales.

That has made it harder for RadioShack to convince anxious lenders to accept the terms it has offered to be able to close hundreds of stores. (It has 4,250 U.S. stores) In March, RadioShack announced a big plan to close 1,100 stores, but its lenders stopped it from doing so, allowing it to only close 200.

RadioShack said talks with those lenders have been “constructive” but made it clear the retailer ultimately has no choice but to eventually cull those stores.

“We continue to have discussions with our lenders about store closings because it’s a key part of our turnaround,” CFO John Feray said.